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Faith in Gentrification Neighbourhood Organisations and Urban Change in London and Berlin This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Faith in gentrification Neighbourhood organisations and urban change in London and Berlin Schlueter, Sebastian Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 24. Sep. 2021 FAITH IN GENTRIFICATION Neighbourhood organisations and urban change in London and Berlin Sebastian Schlueter Doctor Of Philosophy (PhD) Joint-PhD-Programme KCL/HU Berlin March 2017 Contents Contents 2 1 Introduction 3 1.1 The absence of religion in urban studies 6 1.2 Research questions 10 2 Settings 13 2.1 Composing comparisons 13 2.2 The postsecular urban 19 2.3 Urban change and gentrification in London and Berlin 23 2.4 Doing fieldwork 35 3 Church and city 42 3.1 Churches as neighbourhood organisations 42 3.2 Churches as fields of boundary work 53 4 Claiming urban spaces 70 4.1 Praising the urban fabric 71 4.2 Church-planting and the ’colonisation of neighbourhoods’ 80 4.3 Adapting to spatial changes 89 5 Home-making in the gentrifying city 106 5.1 Desire for belonging 107 5.2 Hospitable spaces 116 5.3 Gentrification and ‘Hipster Christianity’ 128 6 Responding to needs in ‘urban frontiers’ 131 6.1 Empowering and mobilising 132 6.2 Shifting collaborations and local activisms 145 6.3 Ethical ways of responding 157 7 Faith in gentrification: theorising back 160 7.1 Reviving communit(y)ies 161 7.2 Spaces of possibility in urban frontiers 170 References 179 Appendix 197 !2 CHAPTER 1 1 Introduction Hoxton When Beth1 started talking about it for the first time, it was awkward. She was embarrassed to talk about her financial situation in front of the entire church congregation. As a nurse and mother of two, Beth had struggled with money issues every month. In a similar situation to many of the people around her, she regularly filled the gap between her empty bank account and the next pay check with a payday loan, which guarantees quick money for an extremely high interest rate.2 To pay the loan back, she often had to take out another loan – which led her further into the debt trap every month. Beth has been living on a council estate in north Hoxton for 30 years. Bordering the City of London, Hoxton is often referred to as Shoreditch, a city- wide synonym for a vibrant night-life and home to a vast number of technology start-ups. Due to its large housing estates in the north, it is also among the 20 poorest wards in the UK. The area consists of polarised developments; long-term dwellers of a diverse ethnic descent and white working-class households in social rented housing live alongside an international scene related to creative industries, in which people are often branded as 'hipsters'. Increasing this divide, housing prices rose almost 50% between 2012 and 2015 alone, making it a pricier location than other areas in central London (Brooker 2015). The pressure of displacement in Hoxton is high. The church of St Mary is situated right at the centre of Hoxton, in between the ‘edgy’ south and the poorer north. ‘Money Talks’ is one project the church has been involved in recently. Every few weeks, during the Sunday service, members of the church report their financial difficulties and their solutions, empowering others to address serious financial problems. Although Beth is not a strong believer, she began to visit the church regularly in 2011, when things in her life felt out of her control. At St Mary she found advice and now confidently helps others to do the same. Despite the overall tendency of shrinking churches, the congregation of St Mary Hoxton has been growing steadily since 2010. Whereas in 2008 the 1 To guarantee privacy, names of people and locations are anonymised in this thesis. See chapter 2.4 for details. 2 The interest rate is usually about 10-20% for a one-week-loan and adds up to an annualised percentage rate between 260% and 1,040%, depending on the company (Bhutta, Skiba and Tobacman 2015). !3 Church of England was on the verge of selling the building, today the church is growing with the neighbourhood and is filled with more than 150 visitors from a wide variety of social backgrounds every Sunday. Felix, a young vicar in his mid-30s, re-started the congregation after his appointment in 2010. He has built a diverse ‘community’ mainly by initiating and supporting social activities such as ‘Money Talks’, focusing on mobilisation and empowerment: local emergency aid such as the ‘Hackney Food Bank’, fundraising activities for local infrastructure projects, and political campaigns linked to the problems associated with money-lending companies. These various projects are organised by the church to create bonds between the members of the growing congregation and to forge links with its surrounding area. As a result, the church has identified itself as an engaged neighbourhood organisation and created a hospitable space for people to meet who would not meet anywhere else. Kreuzberg and Neukölln Kreuzberg and Neukölln are two districts at the centre of Berlin’s rapid urban change, which is creating an increasing pressure of displacement on low-income households (Helbrecht 2016). The two adjacent areas in Berlin are facing social polarisation similar to that faced in Hoxton, London. Comprised of a diverse population until the early 2000s, mainly the result of immigration during the guest worker programme and working-class households, the area was long stigmatised as socially deprived (Soederberg 2016). A rather underdeveloped housing-market left room for developers to anticipate large profit margins. Today, similar to Hoxton in London, the area of Nord-Neukölln and the eastern parts of Kreuzberg are popular places to live, particularly for younger people moving to the city from other parts of Europe. The area now has the highest rents in Berlin (Berlin Hyp 2016). Rudolf recently moved to the very heart of what the real-estate industry in Berlin has labelled ‘Kreuzkölln’. Initially, he was disappointed. Working part- time as a social worker to help fund his studies, he thought that a church located between the neighbourhoods Kreuzberg and Neukölln would be responsible for creating a space for everyone in the area; that this would be a place where he could engage with the social inequality surrounding him. But he felt that the people he knew from his work, along with the homeless and the poor, were missing from his neighbourhood. Otherwise, being new to the city, the congregation at Kirche für Kreuzberg was exactly what he was looking for. For Rudolf, the church felt cosy, with most of the congregation having a similar background to him, and yet provided an intellectually challenging !4 space with its slightly sceptical atmosphere, and a few small-scale social projects organised by the congregants. Started as a young church plant in 2008 with only 10 members, the Kirche für Kreuzberg congregation grew steadily to 80-100 congregants, most of them in their 20s and early 30s. Their Sunday services are held in the attic of an old transformer station, deliberately signalling the absence of any church- like physical space. The congregation was initiated by two young pastors, who started the church as a Christian start-up sister church of Kirche für Berlin, which itself was only planted in 2005 and already attracts more than 600 people to its services every Sunday. These young congregations in the middle of an expanding Berlin are part of an international church-planting network that focuses its theology on the contemporary urban fabric of trendy neighbourhoods. Just as Rudolf was able to find satisfaction despite his initial disappointment, their way of ‘doing church’ moves back and forth between serving their own clientele and caring for their local context, of whose constant change they are a productive part. What unites Beth’s congregation in Hoxton and Rudolf’s in ‘Kreuzkölln’ beyond their sense of Christian belonging are three things that make these cases particularly interesting from an urban studies perspective: Firstly, these cases challenge the idea that increasingly fewer people belong to religious groups in a context that is dominated by continuing gentrification and secularisation. Despite the wide-spread idea of a decreasing interest in religious lifestyles in globalising cities like London and Berlin, and the shrinking of Christianity in particular, the aforementioned church communities are growing, both in terms of membership and outreach activities related to their urban settings.
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